We investigate the information content of business tendency surveys for key macroeconomic variables in Switzerland. To summarise the information of a large data set of sectoral business tendency surveys we extract a small number of common factors by a principal components estimator. The...

We investigate the information content of business tendency surveys for key macroeconomic variables in Switzerland. To summarise the information of a large data set of sectoral business tendency surveys we extract a small number of common factors by a principal components estimator. The...

Foreign economic activity is a major determinant of export development. This paper presents an indicator for now- and forecasting exports, which is based on survey data that captures foreign economic perspectives. We construct an indicator by weighting foreign PMIs of main trading partners with...

We investigate the information content of business tendency surveys for key macroeconomic variables in Switzerland. To summarise the information of a large data set of sectoral business tendency surveys we extract a small number of common factors by a principal components estimator. The...

A canonical model is described which reflects the real time informational context of decision-making. Comparisons are drawn with ‘conventional’ models that incorrectly omit market-informed insights on future macroeconomic conditions and inappropriately incorporate information that was not...

A canonical model is described which reflects the real time informational context of decision-making. Comparisons are drawn with ‘conventional’ models that incorrectly omit market-informed insights on future macroeconomic conditions and inappropriately incorporate information that was not...

We introduce a high-dimensional structural time series model, where co-movement between the components is due to common factors. A two-step estimation strategy is presented, which is based on principal components in differences in a first step and state space methods in a second step. The...

The analysis of the macroeconomic impact of fiscal policies in the euro area has been traditionally limited by the absence of quarterly fiscal data. To overcome this problem, we provide two new databases in this paper. Firstly, we construct a quarterly database of euro area fiscal variables for...